Barry Tompkins: Table etiquette isn't lost on some

Bay Area sportscaster Barry Tompkins sits in a restaurant on Monday, Aug. 22, 2011, in Fairfax, Calif. He began his career in San Francisco in 1965 and has worked for HBO and Fox Sports Net. He is known for his work as a boxing commentator, but has covered football and other sports. He lives nearby in Ross.
(IJ photo/Frankie Frost
Frankie Frost

I READ WITH interest in our esteemed Independent Journal this week that Daily Protocol is holding a workshop for teenagers on etiquette and dining essentials — a subject that is near and dear to me for two reasons: One is that my father was only slightly more proper than Gloria Vanderbilt, and two is that I have a son who would have been right at home bonking a woolly mammoth on the head with a stone and devouring it while carrying on a spirited conversation about how its hair sticks in your teeth.

I can still hear my father's voice bellowing at me while he dissected a chicken wing with a knife and fork with the precision of a brain surgeon, "Get your elbows off the table, Barry." I never quite understood that. I needed my elbows on the table to catch my head from nodding off into the mashed potatoes when my dad launched off into another story about, "Children in Europe starving, because I wasn't eating my Brussels sprouts."

I always wondered if kids in Brussels were being told by their parents that, "Children in Appalachia are starving, so eat your meatloaf."

My parents were determined that when I became royalty (They were certain that would be the case because they had it on good authority that our family was somehow related to the Romanovs before the Russian revolution), I would need to know where you put the dessert spoon while entertaining the intelligentsia.

Turned out the laugh was on them when an extensive research project on our family tree showed that rather than living a life draped in ermine robes, our family came from a long line of horse thieves. I suppose that speaks at least in part to my innate ability to handicap the Kentucky Derby.

But, I digress. My parents sent me to a workshop very similar to the one being offered in February by Daily Protocol, and very much like the rest of my schooling, I flunked out.

I was doing very well with not burping or wiping my mouth with the tablecloth when the oh-so-proper matron running the workshop asked me, "Should olives be eaten with the fingers?" I suppose I would have passed the class had I of not gone for the gag line rather than a simple yes or no. "No, I believe the fingers should be eaten separately," I offered. Big laughs from my assembled peers, and a hearty handshake and polite "Thank you so much for coming," from the matron.

Somehow though, over the course of time I have learned what side the bread plate goes on and what side and in what order the glasses go, I know to spoon soup away from rather than toward the mouth, and I know how to hold and use a knife and fork. I will still, on occasion have my elbows on the table — depending on the conversation.

My son, on the other hand, is of the belief that there are only two choices when it comes to utensils — none, or a spear. The only thing that isn't finger food for him is soup — and that's about 50-50. I don't want to be too critical of his eating habits though because he promised he'd bring us a mammoth for Thanksgiving dinner this year.

I am thinking of enrolling him in the etiquette and dining essentials workshop. It says he'll learn communication essentials, family politeness, conversation cues and place setting knowledge.

Not only would it be good for him, but I could learn something too.

I've never have known what side of the plate the spear goes on.

Barry Tompkins is a longtime sports broadcaster who lives in Marin. Contact him at barry tompkins1@gmail.com.